#mimic/reproduce= me trying desperately to avoid 'emulate' bc that's contextually a jargon term & 'pastiche' is pretentious ^^;

[ramenheim]

I think also 'retro games' being MUCH more limited in terms of scope/'''fidelity'''/filesize makes them much easier to mimic/reproduce than trying to compete with AAAA teams doing faux-realism filebloat games; ESPECIALLY with all the new intuitive-UI tools that can be used to sculpt/texture models?

Having to actually pare down and *consider* what mechanics+details are important enough to include (from a time, money, & theme perspective) naturally inclines stylization by highlighting what *matters* to the dev & what is deserving of player appreciation, while cutting away non-essential faff.

(That plus the implied audience buy-in from 'I'm labelling this retro so your expectations can be appropriately set for a 1-5 crew game' that wards off ppl who would otherwise troll it for ""releasing /now/ looking like *that*"" or whatever.)

Like, I'm not gonna deny that indie video games' present preoccupation with pixel art and PS1-style 3D has a big dose of nostalgia to it (including, in many cases, a constructed nostalgia for an era the creators never actually experienced – your average twentysomething indie game auteur in 2023 grew up with Xboxes and GameCubes, not the Super Nintendo!), but I think a large part of the "retro" movement has to be understood as a reaction against the fact that modernism in video games has become so strongly identified with bland photorealism that calling a game "retro" is simply a way of saying that it has a discernible aesthetic thesis. If we want more indie games that look like they belong in the 2020s, there first needs to be an identifiably, unambiguously modern approach to visual design in games that doesn't boil down to shadow-mapping the protagonist's horse's nutsack and calling that an aesthetic.